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Video Game trivia: 7-128′s games for all

Our article yesterday focused on making mainstream games accessible to the disabled. But what about making games that are designed to be accessible from the ground up?

One company that makes games built for universal access is 7-128 Software, a collection of seven full-time employees in the Boston area.

The initial idea for the company came in the mid-80′s, said John Bannick, 7-128′s chief technology officer. He was working at Xerox under Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind.

Musician Stevie Wonder was a longtime user of the machines. One day, they got a call from one of his people.

The machine kept talking about a pirate.

Stevie Wonder was not reading a book about pirates. What was going on, they asked?

Bannick went to one of the engineers. As it turned out, the reading machine had been programmed with a copy of Zork,* which Mr. Wonder must have somehow accidently activated.

“I thought to myself ‘Damn! You could write a text-based game for the blind,’” Bannick said.

Bannick started 7-128 Software in 2007, and the company has a library of puzzle and adventure games, all rated for whether they can be used by players who are blind, visually impaired, colorblind, deaf, motion impaired or cognitively impaired. However, 7-128′s games are targeted to everyone who plays casual games, not just disabled ones, said Bannick.

Though Bannick has been working in user interfaces for 30 years, he’s fascinated by the challenges in making games for the disabled not just accessible, but entertaining. “It’s a whole new realm,” he said.

In one case, the company was doing playability testing for one of the games in the “Inspector Cindy in Newport” series, text-driven adventures that take place in 1890′s-era Rhode Island.

The feedback they got back from one of their blind testers, Rosie, was “This is boring. I want to hear some interesting sounds.”

That was Bannick’s introduction to “ear candy,” as opposed to the usual eye candy. The games now have rich incendental sounds like carriages going by, servant’s chimes or grandfather clocks.

The text also describes the world in a way that isn’t necessarily visual. For instance, the game might talk about hearing steam whistles or smelling horses and perfume.

For the future, Bannick is interested in getting a brain control unit and designing a game specifically for this emerging technology. We here at Kwanzoo will be taking a look at these new devices in the next week or so.

“Since the game was re-coded into the Reading Machine, the coders could have used the word pirate. Or the person who told me why the word “pirate” was being spoken (Steve Baum, then head of Systems Programming) confused Adventure with Zork. I do recall he said that there were not one, but two Zork games in the Reading Machine. So maybe he was using the one title to refer to two similar games. Regardless, it did plant the seed that eventually became the accessibility part of 7-128 Software.

“The interesting thing about it was that at that time the Reading Machine software was written in Data General Nova Assembler. Assembler takes a lot more effort to code. Apparently those coders had a whole lot more time on their hands than we do today.”

One thought on “Video Game trivia: 7-128′s games for all”

I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.

Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).

There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”” , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!